Welcome to Current Affairs. My name is Nathan Robinson. I'm the editor-in-chief of Current Affairs Magazine, and I am delighted to be joined today by Dr. Terry Friedline. She is an associate professor of social work at the University of Michigan. She's the author of the book, Banking on a Revolution,

why financial technology won't save a broken system available from Oxford University Press,

but even more importantly, she is a contributor to the wonderful Current Affairs magazine,

where you may have read.

The most recent piece she wrote for us is the day Wells Fargo closed,

a rather remarkable piece of utopian fiction about the day Wells Fargo closed. Professor Terry Friedland. Thank you so much for

joining us on current affairs today. Well, hi, Nathan. Thanks so much for having me. Okay,

we have to talk about the day Wells Fargo closed. It's one of those unique pieces that we've

published in current affairs. And I suppose instead of me describing, maybe you could describe the core premise.

It was just summarized this piece for our listening audience.

Yeah, I'd love to.

So Wells Fargo, of course, is not officially closed, but I wanted to help people imagine

the day when it could be or would be closed.

A lot of the teaching and the research that I do has to do around big systems.

So racial capitalism, banking, finance, white supremacy, and a struggle sometimes to think about

how those systems get dismantled, like as we simultaneously build out new things

that we want to see for like a more collective sort of solidarity, kind of the future that we

want to have, what does it look like to take pieces of the institutions that are harmful now

and wind them down and then build out new ones. And so I wanted to imagine that

for Wells Fargo. Of course, it is a bank that has been in the news quite a lot. Also, to be clear,

I don't think this is a story unique, like particularly unique to Wells Fargo. I think many banks

and insurance companies share a similar

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